Free Speech and Creepy Liberalism

Don't even get why that guy is whining, surely his going to prison will wind up his girlfriend real good

either at or on your way to a soccer match

in some way, aren't some people always either at or on their way to a soccer match?

i certainly am

https://niskanencenter.org/blog/there-is-no-campus-free-speech-crisis-a-close-look-at-the-evidence/

A good article, which is unfortunately struggling against a populist tide. But 'radical professors are brainwashing students' has been a claim since at least the '30s, it's just unfortunate that the Right has found a new audience to sell that nonsense to.

This was also a pretty good distillation of the hypocrisy: http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2018/04/college-kids-need-suck-stop-wh-mean-trump-supporters-like-conservative-op-ed-columnists-need-safe-spaces-avoid-bring-triggered

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/27/nyregion/fordham-students-professor-harassment.html

So at the beginning of this semester, two seniors, Samantha Norman and Eliza Putnam, decided to do something about it. On the first day of class in January, they visited two of Dr. Jaworski’s Philosophical Ethics classes, taught at the university’s Lincoln Center campus, in Manhattan, before the instructor arrived. Standing in front of a white board with about two dozen students folded into desks in front of them, they delivered a warning.

“We introduced ourselves and said, ‘We just want you to know that there’s a history of allegations against this professor and multiple Title IX complaints,’” Ms. Putnam said.

They told the students to take care of themselves and take care of each other, they said. They were in and out in less than five minutes.

Just a few days later, the women received an email asking them to meet with the department of public safety.

Mr. Miltenberg suggested that Dr. Jaworski was being targeted because “the cultural leftists are intolerant of traditional morality.” The professor had intended to teach a course on “sexuality and morality from a traditionalist perspective,” his lawyer said.

This seems like a bad legal strategy...

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2018/04/03/magazine/why-have-we-soured-on-the-devils-advocate.html

not sure if this was posted and discussed elsewhere, but I enjoyed this essay from nabisco (though I wish it were about 5x longer)

someone on twitter discussing the essay drew the distinction between speech-as-inquiry and speech-as-activism, which I think gets at the heart of the matter. personally, as my professional life becomes more ‘inquiry’-based, I’ve struggled a bit to adapt to the new boundaries of discourse, though I’ve grown to accept that this is what is best for the people to whom it matters the most

america elected the devil president. he does his own pr these days and neither needs nor wants "advocates".

That photoshop is really perfect accompaniment though

I read it

It is a proper length

The nature of the fora is exactly the problem - he could have looped around back to the simile of the addled stranger at the bus stop, imo - but it takes a lot of cognitive calories to figure out if a person is competent or qualified to debate / deliberate with on a topic, but hardly any time to figure out if their perspective seems antithetical to your own.

The anybody-can-edit/post/commit ethos works for things like StackExchange, Wikipedia and GitHub because the goal is The Right Answer and of yours doesn’t work, downvote or whatever. For shit without an “easy” answer, the completely public meeting with no rules of order is a grease fire.

We need to sorta-professionalize moderators, I guess. And to do that we need to figure out what Robert’s Rules look like for our era.

Bump because more people should read the thing k3vin linked

it’s good but should we be encouraging nabisco to post offsite

my non-research supported opinion is that the rise of twitter and 'ratioing' have something to do with this too fwiw

I have turned on people wanting to defend positions that they supposedly don't believe in, which is just a total cop out and waste of time. I loved that Nabisco piece.

it is certainly not a 'waste of time', but part of the point of nabisco's piece is that the nature of today's discussion forums makes it seem that way

I need to know the person's intent/good faith. Everything right now is just people amplifying bs bot talking points. I don't need that amplification if you don't have a personal stake in the game.

I haven't read that nabisco piece since it came out so may have to re-read later.

I have turned on people wanting to defend positions that they supposedly don't believe in

ILX has its "Defend the indefensible" threads, which are a variant of this.

The way I am talking about it is that they use this as a shield of protection.

Basically like how trump uses the "people say..." routine.

ILX has its "Defend the indefensible" threads, which are a variant of this.

I think most of these start with an OP who dislikes something and then people who like that thing respond?

Oh, I totally switched the defend the indefensible and the name something you don't care about thread in my head in my response.

nitsuh very much otm

This is not a result of some sea change in human psychology. It’s an issue of infrastructure. The types of arguments we once venerated — the kinds of critical-thinking dialectics that educators tell us hone the brains of students — make sense in orderly, deliberative settings, places like classrooms and courtrooms and Platonic dialogues. But that is not where online speech takes place anymore. Social-media platforms knocked out the walls of an infinite series of salons, turning them into one gigantic city square teeming with protests and counterprotests, each faction equipped with slogans and banners, each trying to command space and crowd out the opposition. They turned all speech into public pronouncements, and thus all conversation into a strange form of activism, part of a zero-sum battle over which ideas will find a foothold in our collective attention. In the midst of an information war, to express any opinion, sincerely or not, is seen as giving it space and therefore material support. Nobody stands in the middle of a march holding a sign that says, “What if One of Our Demands Is Unwise?”

It’s often argued that this makes our conversations increasingly polarized, dogmatic, intolerant of complexity and logically sloppy. It’s less often pointed out that this might be because they aren’t really “conversations” in the first place.

^^^ Yeah there is no baseline, foundational level of knowledge in these discussions. You have 20 year old bots from arguing with niche experts in their field. Or people saying that these are inarguably shithole countries even though they have never been outside the 48 states.

kevin that "speech-as-inquiry" vs "speech-as-activism" distinction is interesting and makes sense to me.

also this resonates a lot w/ me:

personally, as my professional life becomes more ‘inquiry’-based, I’ve struggled a bit to adapt to the new boundaries of discourse, though I’ve grown to accept that this is what is best for the people to whom it matters the most

there are a lot of moments when i want to say to folks "i'm not really sure about that" or "is this really how we want to talk?" or "i think things are more complex than that" and i decide not to say anything. "do i really need to say this" is something i ask myself a lot, and often the answer is no. sometimes it is hard to ask a question or express an opinion without seeming like an asshole with a shitty opinion or giving credence to assholes with shitty opinions, and in those moments i decide not to say anything

a big part of it is meaning. half the time discussions are going on where everybody is coming at it with different meanings. one person spends all day reading about X and they come into a thread to talk about it and there is all this context they are bringing in that nobody else knows. or that only like minded media consumers know.

then there is the "responding to trolls" horrible shit that clogs things up, where someone makes a stance against an imagined stance that isn't even being made itt. then you end up arguing against someone who is arguing against an imagined viewpoint nobody actually stated. it's almost entirely pointless.

like i think a big problem with the US 2016 election was you constantly had the entire world is weighing in on US politics and what is typical left for the US is not typical left for the world so those kind of discussions inevitably caught on fire and careened towards the sun

In real life I gauge a lot about whether to say anything and usually lean towards always saying something, but this likely comes from being a woman and wanting my opinion always heard. I may temper my response but I try to make sure it's clear. Like the last time this occurred was during a dinner in a european country with a Russian colleague of my spouse. He was complaining that the private music (and regular education) school his kids went to was going to start busing in lower income students and he wanted them to switch schools. This type of socialism HE DID NOT LIKE. The whole country was becoming too socialist. I thought about it and couldn't let it go and just said "well, part of going to school and education is learning to relate to people of different classes and backgrounds. It's something that only helps us later." The guy just nodded and switched the conversation. Ha! Oh, but I also asked "isn't Russia kind of socialist???" (i had no clue).

I have very strong opinions but I try to be a “cooler head” which sometimes actually means I just don’t say anything. I don’t really enjoy or revel in getting riled up about much of anything for whatever reason, I enjoy debating ideas but maybe in a way that does give that room to the other side in a way I also don’t enjoy for the reasons marcos mentions.

Like my folks (especially my mom) get doom and gloom about everything Trump does. Even this Roseanne thing this morning. I find it all absurd in a terrible way but I also think getting extremely offended by Roseanne in 2018 is weird, I don’t want to simply dismiss things like that as meaningless but getting up in arms about everything seems a but counterproductive.

I had a brief moment recently where I got pissed at an alt-right dude I know and I hated that I showed my hand like that, I don’t want to let it get to me. That may also be part of it. I don’t think of it as self-censoring but maybe more strategic in a sense. Idk.

It's weird right. Because sometimes I think people's bad hardcore opinions are because no one ever challenged them or told them they were wrong as a youngster. Or maybe they are rebelling against always being told they are wrong. Which one is it?

sometimes both. some shitty opinion could be one person's iconoclasm and another's received wisdom.

omar otm, I am still guilty of getting overwrought on ilx or in some casual conversations about things but my general tendency in life is to stick with "that's fucked up" or "I disagree" or "I stand with that guy" on things where my personal stakes are low

just too much effort to get too invested and it puts you out in a way that just standing firm and saying "nope" doesn't

I think part of the problem in 2018 with playing devil's advocate is that people are invested in trolling for the sake of trolling and just want people to get caught out. Really playing devil's advocate is about helping to define and firm up a position counter to what you're postulating, but people are putting out positions where their personal stances are vague or undefined and they're more invested in the argument than they are the stakes of the issue.

Devil's advocate is a good position for challenging your own position, not for defining it from scratch. And you have to be willing to find the correct take in the balance of responses.

i do read things other than NYT op-eds, fwiw, but I saw this as a bit of a companion piece to that nabisco essay I posted last week

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/05/30/magazine/who-gets-to-decide-what-belongs-in-the-canon.html

This is to say that fandom and spectatorship, of late, have grown darkly possessive as the country has become violently divided. Especially in this moment when certain works of canonical art are in fact at risk of becoming morally obsolete — both art that degrades and insults and the work of men accused of having done the same. There’s a camp of fans — who tend to be as white and male as the traditional canon makers — who don’t want that work opened up or repossessed. They don’t want a challenge to tradition — so please, no women in the writers’ room, say superfans of the animated comedy “Rick and Morty,” and no earnest acknowledgment that Apu is a bothersome South Asian stereotype, say the makers of “The Simpsons.” It’s all too canonical to change.

You can see the reactionary urge on every side. We’ve reached this comical — but politically necessary — place in which nonstraight, nonwhite, nonmale culture of all kinds has also been placed beyond reproach. Because it’s precious or rare or not meant for the people who tend to do the canonizing. If Korama Danquah, writing for a site called Geek Girl Authority, asserts that the sister of Black Panther is more brilliant than the white billionaire also known as Iron Man, she doesn’t want to hear otherwise. “Shuri is the smartest person in the Marvel universe,” goes the post. “That’s not an opinion, that’s canon. She is smarter than Tony Stark.” “Black Panther,” according to this argument, is canon not only because it’s a Marvel movie but because it matters too much to too many black people to be anything else.

But that’s also made having conversations about the movie in which somebody leads with, “I really liked it, but ...” nearly impossible. This protectionism makes all the sense in the world for a country that’s failed to acknowledge a black audience’s hunger for, say, a black comic-book blockbuster. But critic-proofing this movie — making it too black to dislike — risks making it less equal to and more fragile than its white peers.

The intolerance of the traditional gatekeepers might have spurred a kind of militancy from thinkers (and fans) who’ve rarely been allowed in. Bloom’s literary paradise is long lost, and now history compels us to defend Wakanda’s. But that leaves the contested art in an equally perilous spot: not art at all, really, but territory.

interesting part at the end noting how the stifling of dissent by gatekeepers is a universal phenomenon. you could argue the single example by a website I've never heard of makes a somewhat flimsy case, but I think most would acknowledge this happens everywhere if they're being honest

It very much does, anything important and “canonical” has its own police who attempt to exert control over the discourse around it. Cf. ILM

Has this been posted yet? One of the weirder and creepier campus stories of late: https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/6/1/17417042/niall-ferguson-stanford-emails

LGM got real heated about that but I think lemieux and loomis both already had google news alerts tuned for Niall Ferguson, they hate that smarmy fuck (and with good reason)

Aside from all the larger things that are wrong with this, it's just stunningly petty. Wtf mid-50s dude who has Chaired programmes at Ivies and advised a leading government and American Presidential candidate gets invested in digging dirt on a 19- or 20-year-old undergrad running for a position in his student government.

It’s like he feels threatened!

Would love to hear a Niall Ferguson-themed parody cover of Losing My Edge

A bit off-topic, but a good enough place for this piece by K.T. Nelson on comedy in the Trump era

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/nekqvg/the-conservative-war-on-comedy-is-full-of-shit

I love everything about this proposal for a conservative, Omaha-based Saturday Night Live rip-off https://t.co/4dNnE3BDtw pic.twitter.com/3o9lhsbUvl

— Will Sommer (@willsommer) June 7, 2018

My favorite things about that are (1) the "sketch ideas" are all either just sketch titles or maybe the *beginning* of a sketch idea with nothing further and (2) somehow a bunch of comedy writers and performers will just materialize in omaha, along with all of the crew needed to produce a high-quality television show. Well thought out

I think they first need to create a conservative UCB and Groundlings from which to snatch up and coming wingnut comic performers. It will take maybe 3 months if they are motivated.

That whole thing is itself a perfect SNL sketch about beleaguered right wingers trying to create their own late night comedy show.

My favorite things about that are (1) the "sketch ideas" are all either just sketch titles or maybe the *beginning* of a sketch idea with nothing further

yes its a SNL copy

Oh joy, Jonathan Haidt has gotten worse, and has apparently doubled-down on fetishized reasonableness against all else

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/sep/20/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind-review

The point of the style is to signal the distance between the authors and the partisans of identity who are too emotional to think clearly. The fact that Lukianoff and Haidt claim the authority to police discourse becomes clear the first time they discuss the role “overreaction from the right” has played in recent campus wars – at least halfway through the book. They quote death threats that Princeton professor Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor received in 2017, including “lynching and having the bullet from a .44 Magnum” put in her head. “One might conclude,” Lukianoff and Haidt write, that if she and two other professors who received such threats “had spoken in a more deliberative style, befitting a professor, they would have had no trouble”.

fetished reasonableness is actually an innate foundational human value

a-a-and some ELBOW PATCH jackets too!!